Blog Posts for 2015

Srinivasan Ramani, who was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014, played a key role in India’s Education and Research Network (ERNET) and led the effort to set up ERNET’s international gateway, starting with a link to Amsterdam in 1987. Although he retired in 2011 from teaching at the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, Dr. Ramani remains a teacher at heart and has a broad perspective on education, which he was gracious enough to share with us in a recent conversation.

Q. What has changed in engineering education in India since you were a student?

A. Believe it or not, when I first began my studies in engineering in 1958, there were just about 3,500 engineering admissions per year in all of India. According to the latest figures now, there are well over a million admissions each year to four-year courses leading to university degrees in engineering, in over 3,000 colleges nationwide. That is, there are nearly 300 times more students starting their engineering education every year, compared to the time I started college. It is amazing.

It is hard to believe that an old dream of mine has finally come true: We now have a neutral Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Thailand, which will help increase Internet capacity throughout Southeast Asia.

It’s really amazing for me to realize that this IXP, formally called the Bangkok Internet Exchange Point (BKNIX), had its impetus at the Internet Society’s 2013 Internet Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Berlin.

Although I was among those being inducted that day, for me the most exciting part was meeting many ISOC officials and fellow inductees who offered to help me. Here was the problem: The Internet in Thailand has evolved greatly over the past 25 years, and many for-profit Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have sprung up, but communication among them was expensive and inefficient. Since they used older technology, if you were a customer of one of them, and were trying to reach a customer of another – even if that person was just across town – you had to go through several “hops.” The ISPs were interested in working together but were unable to move on to a better setup because it wasn’t financially or technically easy for any of them to run an IXP. What was needed was a “neutral party” that wouldn...

Will our descendants centuries from now be able to interpret the blogs, websites, and other forms of online information, data and photos we are creating today? Not likely, Internet Hall of Famer Vint Cerf warns in this eye-opening interview with the BBC, unless we figure out a way to capture and recreate the “digital ecosystem” in which these things were created.

In nearly every country in the world, technology plays a major role. Yet, even though women make up half the global population, they make up only a fraction of technology college graduates and the technology workforce. And, there’s a disturbing trend in some regions of the world where the number of women pursuing education and careers in technology fields are declining.

As we commemorate International Woman's Day 2015, we decided to explore why the number of girls and women entering technology fields does not reflect the global population. We asked four members of the Internet Society Hall of Fame for their insights on how to attract more girls and women to careers in technology.